It has been 12 years since I last saw my father as he lay struggling to breathe in a hospital room. So much has happened since then, and sometimes I think to tell my father about my life, knowing that he already knows. I always wanted to know more about his, but being far from extended family and the places that activate memory, those stories rarely surfaced. Recently, I returned to Bangkok, this time with my younger son. I realized that although it was the place where my father grew up, it did not hold my memory of him. I am at peace with knowing just what I know of my father and who he was to me in the years we shared together. What I long for is not what I cannot know, but what I miss of him.

I have been teaching my 16-year-old son how to drive. He is a confident young man and his driving reflects that. One hand on the steering wheel, the other relaxed and gesturing as he speaks, I am somehow pulled into his easy conversation. He is a good driver. My body, which has had to learn how to breathe while he is driving, releases into the ride. I trust him. I trust my friend who drives a sports car a little too fast, but with a love for the curves of the road, the trees flashing by, the bumps that send us up for a moment, and our movement through the world. I am learning how to lean into this life.

Ten years ago this week, I sat at my father’s bedside in his final days. In those last breathing moments, I did not know what I would remember of him. I just knew that something was happening in that bright, white, dreamlike hospital space. I know now that I was experiencing my father’s gradual transformation from fully alive and here and now, to being in remembrance. My grandfather was already there, in a place where earthly imperfection is gone and the godly goodness of what we choose to remember becomes our inheritance, our birthright.

I am interested in how memory and imagination intersect to weave a story. Just as my aunty remembered her father, now I remember mine and can feel his spirit presence in spaces he once occupied physically. I live in a house that has contained other people, their voices and movement. Even as memory fades and becomes disjointed, sometimes I still see a shadow standing at the kitchen counter, hear a familiar sound at the door. My imagination remembers deeply and I am grateful for its firm hold on a world that I have loved.

This fall I have taken several trips for work and for my film project. Although I like travel, it comes with other responsibilities, like making sure things are set at home, that my son is in good care, that I have managed my commitments at work. Even with all that to think about, once I am suspended above, leaving the ground behind, I have time to settle into another space. I find that I read a lot on planes, that I think in taxis, and that generally my life is a little suspended when I step into the anonymity of another place. Rather than travel as motion, going somewhere, it becomes for me a time of stillness and reflection. This crossing over a footbridge in Thailand was a similar moment of presence and attention to the time, place, circumstance, and even uncertainty I was experiencing.

I am looking forward to a train ride soon — to take my oldest son off to college in Washington state. I imagine moving through the plains and mountains and watching so much pass by while sitting with my child now moving into adulthood. The train will give us time, even as we travel efficiently west. The train will hold us together a little longer slowing us down long enough to notice the sweetness of this rhythm of our lives, of our swirling together, apart, together again.

Sometimes our senses are on high alert, taking in an abundance of sight, sound, smell, taste. The market where my aunties shop in Chiang Mai is this kind of place, so rich in everything that I wonder how I can take it all in. Yet it is all stored somewhere inside me, each sense absorbing a piece of the story. Brush away just part of the dust covering a memory and soon the whole picture emerges again. Try it. Close your eyes.

My first language was Thai, simply the result of absorbing what I heard at home as the first child of Thai immigrants in Omaha, Nebraska. The world I lived in then as a toddler was small and safe and full of language. But then school became necessary and the teacher let my parents know that I really did not speak English. So the world grew larger, but a little less secure. Although I have lost my first language, I have not forgotten it. Still, listening to my family talk, I understand. I have held on and kept at least an ear and maybe more of myself in both worlds.

With so many ways of acquiring luck — through charms, rituals, even cash — you would think all would be right with the world. But luck, as we truly know, has nothing to do with any of this. Some part living well, some part practicing integrity, a large part pure chance, good fortune has no formula. It comes down to how we measure it. I count it as luck that I had this lively, colorful moment with my family. And what good fortune to remember Setting Birds Free with my cousin years before, and to see that this is where it got me.

While in Chiang Mai, we visited the Buddhist temple where my family worshipped. We brought food and an offering of money to the monk, and in return asked for the blessing we so needed. “Pour the water,” the monk said, and as we poured, he chanted, the words running with the water. I recognized words and phrases and our family name: Koslaphirom. “America,” he said. The words flowed and flowed until the water ran out. He stopped and bowed. We thanked him, then stepped out into the physical world again.